Essays on Woolf

ELT 41:1 1998 Berg. Wussow prints some of this material in an appendix and leaves the reader to recover the rest from other sources. It was merely Woolf's parsimony that made her begin her new novel on the blank pages of the manuscript of its predecessor, Jacob's Room, now in the Berg. That this accidental separation of parts should here be enshrined in print ignores Woolf's order of composition and makes this edition much less readable than it might have been. It is a most unfortunate editorial decision and makes it hard even for a Woolf scholar to follow the stages of her work on the book. Finally, however, all the evidence for the study of how Mrs. Dalloway evolved is in print, though some is here in scrambled order, some in Susan Dick's edition of Woolf's Complete Shorter Fiction, some in her diary and letters. Although Wussow does not undertake such a study, students of Woolf can now do so without struggling with her difficult handwriting. There is reason to be grateful to Helen Wussow for her recuperative effort. Alex Zwerdling ______________University of California, Berkeley Essays on Woolf Gillian Beer. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996; University of Michigan Press, 1997. 183 pp. $49.95 / $16.95 THIS VOLUME brings together seven of Gillian Beer's previously published essays, composed for various occasions and audiences from 1984 to 1992, and prints for the first time an essay on the impact of contemporary science on Woolf's later work. Most of the reprinted essays originally appeared in other collections—one celebrating the centenary of Woolf 's birth, others on women reading women, on Victorian writers, and on nation and narration. The essays on The Waves and Between the Acts first appeared as introductions to paperback reprints of those novels, and one piece made its debut in Essays in Criticism. Aside from the addition of a few cross-references in footnotes, none of the essays appear to have undergone revision or updating for reprinting, and the collection as a whole thus represents the evolution of Beer's ideas during the period of its writing. Given the diverse circumstances of composition, the volume revels in a wide diversity of aim. The essays nonetheless have a family resemblance in seeking, individually and collectively, to illuminate how the intellectual preoccupations and the developments in science and tech98 BOOK REVIEWS nology of Woolf's time appear in and influenced her writing. The collection is also unified by attitude and tone, the keynotes struck in its brief preface and introduction—pleasure, exhilaration, revelation—presaging the lively treatment of an individual text or of an overarching idea discerned in a number of them. The volume principally proposes informed appreciation of Woolf's fiction through a deepened awareness of the intellectual and cultural forces at play (and at work) in it. Organized chronologically, the collection moves from an opening piece on Woolf's interest in prehistory, an evidence of the influence of Darwin and Freud on her thinking, to a concluding essay on her awareness in her late fiction of England's island nature and the psychological and literary consequences of the new technology of flight on this. Not all the essays prove to be of equal interest or depth, and the constraints imposed by the effort to appeal to a sophisticated, but not necessarily specialist, audience are at times felt. "Hume, Stephen and Elegy in To the Lighthouse ," critically the most trenchant piece and tellingly the only one published in a scholarly journal, offers a measured discussion of how Hume's ideas about perception, as articulated through Leslie Stephen, play a crucial role in the novel's structure and thematics. In addition to setting out Woolf's debts to Hume, the essay reclaims Stephen's centrality in Woolf's intellectual inheritance and usefully counterbalances the more extreme feminist characterizations of him. Although brief, the essay on the influence of the popularized science of the 1920s and 1930s—wave and sound theory, in particular—on Woolf's later writing suggestively links stylistic effect and narrative procedure to issues then under scientific investigation. On the other hand, "The Victorians...